Tinker and Blue by Frank Macdonald

me, you’d think that as soon as Hitler heard I wasn’t there to stop him anymore he was going to send submarines up the Margaree River and take over the whole country. Getting taken for granted like that told me that those officers didn’t think any more of me than the gun I was carrying. I did what I had promised to do when I enlisted, then I came home.”
    â€œYou should of stayed, buddy,” Farmer said. “You’d be sitting pretty on a pension right now. I can’t figure it out myself. I was with you. You weren’t no damned coward. That’s what bothers all of us at the Legion when it comes up. Why the hell did Monk run? There’s not a guy who was over there who thinks you were scared.”
    â€œI would have stayed,” Blue said. “You too, Tinker.”
    â€œMaybe,” Tinker answered, “but if they told us in June after a whole year of school that we would have to keep going for July and August I’d go to the woods too.”
    Monk turned to him and stuck out his hand. “Put her there, buddy.” Then turning to Farmer while he shook Tinker’s hand he said, “This is the first man who’s ever heard what I was saying.” For Tinker, it was the first time in all his fourteen years that anyone had called him a man.
    â€”
    The people in front of the recruitment centre chanting “Hell, no! I won’t go!” wasn’t the same thing as Monk going to war, doing what he said he would do, then coming home. Monk had no trouble living with himself. Not now, anyway, although Tinker could remember when he was drunk all the time, and people said it was because he couldn’t live with the idea that he was a coward. But Tinker, listening to Monk talk about it, wasn’t so sure about that, because Monk had told him a lot more about himself later on. He would like to talk to Monk now, hear what he had to say about people who wouldn’t go to war at all, not even against the Communists. The difference, Tinker guessed, was that the people who chased Monk for leaving the war were the ones who were in it themselves. This afternoon’s fight on the street was between the young people who wouldn’t go off to war and the other people who wanted them to go while they stayed home and watched it on television.
    Confused by his own thoughts, Tinker turned his attention to the steering wheel, revved the Plymouth’s engine in neutral and matted it down an imaginary road toward home.

14
    Tinker Dempsey sat on the sidewalk strumming Blue’s guitar. Chording for himself was the limit of his interest in the instrument, but it felt like company, which was more than Blue had been as their days in San Francisco stretched into weeks. Leaving Tinker to hustle their daily bread, Blue found numerous excuses to explore the territory, waving and nodding and winking his way along the street, greeting people with a “Hi, cousin!” or calling out a first name when he knew it. Bit by bit, he had introduced himself, Tinker, Farmer, Monk and most of Cape Breton Island to anyone in the Haight-Ashbury area who stood still long enough to listen. He dispensed stories about “This guy we have back home, eh?” and gathered items of interest to bring back to Tinker.
    â€œTinker, old buddy, I was walking by that vegetable restaurant up there and potatoes being pretty near a vegetable it reminded me of the time a crew from home went picking potatoes on Prince Edward Island. You heard that one, didn’t you, about how they got into the wine the first night they were paid and began playing baseball in the middle of the field and by morning had smashed about an acre of potatoes right out of Yankee Stadium? They were heaving their hungover guts over the side of the ferry the next morning on their way back to Nova Scotia. They say it was the most people ever fired at one time on PEI except for the day after an election.
    â€œWell, I see this